A Harvest Kernel working session
The Bottleneck Brief
Twenty minutes, one course, one honest sentence. You will finish holding a completed one page brief that names where your course actually breaks, traces it to a cause, and states plainly whether it is a technology problem or a design problem. Nothing here is saved and nothing is sent anywhere.
The University of Waterloo built an AI certificate with Cohere where the first skill students learn is diagnosing the organizational bottleneck before anyone selects a tool. Dr. Edith Law, who runs it, put it this way: “AI adoption is not the point, but solving problems is.” This session runs that same order of operations on a course you are teaching right now.
Seed . Step one
Pick the course you are actually teaching
Not the one you wish you were teaching, and not the one that is easiest to think about. Pick the course that is on your calendar this term. The whole method fails if you choose a hypothetical.
Sprout . Step two
Name the single place it breaks
One place. Not a list. The test is either where the most of your time goes, or where the most students stall. If two candidates are close, take the one that has happened more than one term in a row, because a repeat is a structure and a one off is a bad week.
Write it as a sentence a colleague would understand without context. “Week three” is not an answer. “Half the class submits the literature review without a working thesis, every term” is.
Grow . Step three
Classify it, because only two of the three involve AI
This is the step the tool vendors skip and it is the step that decides everything after it. Read all three and pick the one that fits. If two seem to fit, pick the earlier one in the list, because a design problem dressed as a capacity problem is the most expensive mistake in this whole exercise.
Harvest . Step four
Your brief
This is the finished artifact. It is a document you could hand a chair, put at the top of a course revision, or read out in four sentences at a program meeting. Build it, then copy it somewhere you will find it again.
Built by Harvest Kernel. Nothing on this page is saved, stored or transmitted. Close the tab and it is gone.
Source: Partnering to lead AI transformation across organizations, University of Waterloo, August 6, 2026.